Festival Forum: Body Horror

27 Sep, 2pm

Dublin Municipal Theatre at Smock Alley

€5

Duration: 90 mins

“Horror is an intimate, eerie, terrifying thing, and when it’s done well it can unmake you, the viewer, the reader”
– Carmen Maria Machado

In recent years feminist body horror has emerged as a tool for metabolizing the complexities of contemporary female experience. Anchored by Florentina Holzinger’s ferocious performance piece TANZ – this cross-disciplinary panel explores the genre’s aesthetics of discomfort and endurance. Holzinger will be joined by the essayist Angelica Jade Bastién, and author and journalist Sophie White, in a conversation chaired by academic Sarah Cleary, to investigate how horror moves across mediums to articulate unspoken truths and push the boundaries of artistic expression.

Sponsors

Speaker Bios

Florentina Holzinger

Florentina Holzinger is an Austrian performance artist and choreographer whose practice combines extreme physicality with theatrical precision to probe the limits of corporeal agency. Working across dance, performance, opera and theatre while critically engaging with their histories, Holzinger blends legitimised ‘high’ culture with pop and countercultural currents to unsettle the lines between spectacle and subversion. In collaboration with a team and cast that bring expertise in a broad range of body-based practices and performance genres, her works experiment with body modification – in all its possible forms – as an interplay of transformation and illusion.

Holzinger’s works have been awarded the Nestroy (TANZ, 2020) and Faust awards (Ophelia’s Got Talent, 2023) and have been selected by Theatertreffen Berlin four times in a row (TANZ, Ophelia’s Got Talent, SANCTA, A Year Without Summer). Besides her stage productions, Holzinger creates Etudes, an ongoing series of site-specific, one-off performances in public space that have been presented in collaboration with Schinkel Pavillon Berlin, Kunsthall Bergen, Atonal Festival and Wiener Festwochen among others. Since 2021, she is associate artist at Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin, and since February 2026 she is represented by Thaddaeus Ropac gallery. In 2026, she represents Austria at the 61st edition of the Biennale Arte of Venice.

Sarah Cleary

Having gained her PhD in Horror from Trinity College, Dublin, Sarah Cleary is a Media Consultant, Academic and Senior Development Executive with Wild Atlantic Pictures (EVIL DEAD RISE, THE MUMMY) specialising in genre features.

Author of The Myth of Harm. Horror Censorship and the Child (2024) which explores society’s long and often uncomfortable relationship between children, horror, and media effects, she has lectured and published extensively on the genre of horror.

When not talking, writing, watching or dreaming about horror, she produces The Rocky Horror Picture Show which has run at Dublin’s Sugar Club for over 20 years.

Sophie White

Sophie White is a novelist, essayist and podcaster from Dublin. She also holds a First-Class Honours degree in Sculpture from NCAD. She is the author of eight books. Her first four books, Recipes for a Nervous Breakdown (Gill 2016), Filter This (Hachette, 2019), Unfiltered (Hachette, 2020) and The Snag List (Hachette, 2022) have all been bestsellers and award nominees. Her fifth book, the bestselling memoir Corpsing (Tramp Press, 2021), was shortlisted for an Irish Book Award and the Michel Déon Prize for non-fiction. Her sixth book, Where I End (Tramp Press, 2022) was described as “brilliantly visceral” by the Guardian and “exquisite and disturbing, brutish and beautifully crafted” by The Irish Times. It won the Shirley Jackson Award for best novel. Her seventh book and fifth novel, My Hot Friend (Hachette, 2023) won the An Post Irish book Award for Popular Fiction. Her eighth book, Such A Good Couple, was shortlisted for an Irish Book Award. Sophie writes a weekly column ‘Nobody Tells You’ for the Sunday Independent LIFE magazine and her journalism has been nominated for numerous media awards. An adaptation of her first is in development and she co-hosts the chart-topping comedy podcasts, Mother of Pod and The Creep Dive.

Angelica Jade Bastién

Angelica Jade Bastién is a writer, film critic, and essayist. She writes about pop culture in order to explore deeper themes about madness, blackness, femininity, and more as a way to engage with the art of being alive. She has been on staff at New York Magazine since 2017. She has previously written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, The Village Voice, the Criterion Collection and many other publications. She can be found on her Substack newsletter, Madwomen & Muses. Her website is angelicabastien.com. Originally from the South, Bastién now lives in Chicago with her two cats.

Duration:
90 mins